New Feed2JS feature 

It now supports enclosures. Nice to see development is continuing even though Alan Levine is leaving Maricopa Community Colleges.

Thought-provoking piece on content at Publishing 2.0 by Scott Karp 

What if no one will pay for content?

Scott says:

What if dollars have no place in the new economics of content?

In a WSJ cyber-dialogue with Vint Cerg, Esther Dyson was channeling Michael Goldhaber and managed to crystalize for me (finally) the key insight of media 2.0:

... attention has its own intrinsic value, independent of money. People go on the Web in search of attention; they don't want to give it as much as get it.

This is a blazing, head-spinning insight.

...

This make perfect sense in a world of participatory media -- the value flow has reversed itself. MySpace can't sell attention to advertisers because the site itself HAS NONE. Nobody pays attention to MySpace -- users pay attention to each other, and compete for each other's attention -- it'' as if the site itself doesn't exist.

I'll confess I've had trouble really understanding the concept of attention, and until this moment thought of it as completely one-way -- me giving attention to something else, something either more important or more commerial than me. I don't know why it got fixed in my head that way because the two-way nature of the web is the essence of it for me.

Tell me so I'll feel smarter: do you get attention or has it been a muddy thing for you too?

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Attention for mi mi mi mi! 

Sean Bohan talked about Dave's reopening, maybe tommorrow, of Share Your OPML. I won't link to Sean because he linked to some discussion of the test and I think Dave wanted to hold back on that until he's sure he's ready for a crowd. [Later: see Sean's comment on this.]

In his post early this morning Sean lists the top 20 feeds at that time, and comments:

All of these guys are on my list (and in the aggregators of the Producers who work for me). Except... I have never seen This Is Lisa and Amyloo's blogs. Cool - something new to check out. New ideas. New directions.

Alas, by tomorrow you won't see posts like that because as the pool gets bigger my lowly blog will fall off the list as fast as an anvil in a cartoon, and the list will start to look more like the Technorati 100. It'll be a more accurate reflection of reality.

That's alright because I've always been pretty much comfortable with the idea of being famous for 15 people, which gives me some striving room because I'm only famous for six people!

But what about this? What if there were subsets of the members of Share Your OPML? Dave said Dan recrafted the site in PHP. I'm guessing that means MySQL too, and a relational database opens the door for some interesting crosstab possibilities.

If a member's profile included certain demographic info, you could look at top 100 lists from all women members, or all age 40+ members or all Europeans. That's something Technorati doesn't do.

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Later: maybe it is open 

I see Steve Rubel has linked to Share Your OPML and the password protection has been taken off. Maybe Dave decided the cat's out of the bag.

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Traditional variables are so boring 

A consultant for a long-ago employer turned me on to SPSS in the middle 80s and I realized how interesting stats could be. For a very small dark obscure corner of the whole body of knowledge in the universe, a survey could help you discover something nobody had ever known. That gave me a really powerful and goosebump-provoking feeling. Later I did some independent survey research, and wrote some marketing materials for SPSS itself -- they loved finding writers who could talk chi-squares and stuff!

The surveys I did for money had to contain all the variables for the categories they wanted to study for marketing purposes: age, gender, income, rent or own your home. You know. When I did surveys for fun, I liked to throw in the odd question that I thought would measure something somewhat fuzzier. Once, trying to get at whether women were grown-up serious cooking moms with homes I asked, "Do you have cornstarch in your kitchen cabinet?"

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